I purposefully avoided mentioning HPFS (the OS/2 file system) for NT as it
is no longer supported under NT 4.0.  Yes, you can install it and make it
work under 4.0, but who cares?  NTFS is much more advanced than HPFS.

Kind regards,

Denys. . .

Denys Beauchemin
Hicomp America, Inc.
[log in to unmask]        www.hicomp.com
(800) 323-8863   (281) 288-7438  fax: (281) 355-6879



-----Original Message-----
From:   Steve Dirickson b894 WestWin [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
Sent:   Monday, June 09, 1997 9:48 AM
To:     [log in to unmask]
Subject:        Re: URL naming

<<In actuality, WFW brought in a 32 bit file access for DOS/Windows back
in 1992.  This file access was built on the FAT16 file system and enabled
32 bit file access on existing systems, without having to reload.  At the
time, the FAT16 was quite sufficient since disk drives were only a few
hundred megabytes in size and the space lost due to large clusters was
inconsequential.>>


These two (FAT16 and the "32 bit file access" of WFWG) are really
separate issues. WFWG's optional "32-bit file system" was simply a method
to access standard DOS-type FAT partitions without having to make the
trip to and from real mode to use the DOS INT21H file functions.
Likewise, the "32-bit disk access" of WFWG was another method to avoid a
pair of mode transitions, this time to access the actual disk using
protected-mode drivers, thus avoiding a trip to real mode to use the
BIOS-resident or real-mode physical disk interface logic. But WFWG,
without either, with either, or with both, still used the standard
DOS-compatible FAT file system.

Conversely (as has been pointed out), FAT32 and NTFS (and HPFS in case
anybody cares) are physically different on-disk file systems that use
different data structures, different directory layouts, and different
storage allocation sizes and rules; none of them are backward compatible
with DOS/16-bit Windows without specialized third-party redirector
software.

Steve